My father - who died four years ago to the day, and whose love for the English language inspired my own – was very fond of saying: “It’s a good job we’re all different”. It’s a phrase he used about everything from politics to why some of his friends had kept their hair into their eighties when he hadn’t. He was a Yorkshireman, fiercely independent, and proud of it, and I suspect that I’ve inherited from him a slight mistrust of following the crowd. My original title for THE MANY LIVES OF JOHN STONE was, as it happens, DIFFERENT. It is, after all, about a man who happens to have inherited a particularly robust set of genes which have allowed him to reach the age of 330. And difference brings with it a sense of separateness, a capacity for observing others and a yearning to belong.
So when I started to think about the character of John Stone, it seemed to me that many teenage readers (and the teen inside adult readers), could identify with his situation. You don’t yet quite know who you are, and that sense of belonging or - being different in some way - is never felt with greater intensity. I decided to split the story into two: one contemporary narrative that brings together John Stone and 17-year-old Spark and the other John Stone’s first-person account of his troubled adolescence in Versailles. I was determined to do justice to this complex character by giving him a voice that was nuanced and that reflected his life experience. It was never an option for me to short-change my - very adult -character nor patronise readers.
At the same time I wanted to show how a contemporary 17-year-old could have a crucial influence on a 350-year-old’s fate. Young, old, middle-aged: no generation stands alone and I wanted to celebrate that in my novel. So is THE MANY LIVES OF JOHN STONE teen or adult fiction or ‘crossover’ or ‘crossunder’? You tell me! As a writer, if you think a story is worth telling, you stay true to it, however many boundaries you might have to cross.